The looming challenges of regulating high level autonomous vehicles

This article captures the implications of technology supportive of high level autonomous vehicles eclipsing the capacity of regulators to respond. To date, policy makers and industry actors have avoided confronting the impending gap, a consequence of the fact that current levels of vehicle autonomy are sufficiently low that accountability for decision-making affecting the operation of vehicles still resides with the driver. However, as automotive firms achieve higher levels of vehicle autonomy and control shifts to the vehicle itself and the infrastructure supporting it, the preponderance of responsibility will transfer to different actors: automotive firms, autonomous vehicle programmers, and policy makers. This article explains and quantifies the challenges that will arise as that process unfolds. It does this by introducing four ethics and value-based foundations that can be used to guide programming of decisions to be made by autonomous vehicles. The purpose is not to recommend a specific ethics or value-based foundation for programming high level autonomous vehicles. Rather, by programming dilemma-inducing scenarios and then directing outcomes on the basis of distinct ethical or values-based foundations, we quantifiably demonstrate that autonomous vehicle programming decisions, whether they are guided by a particular ethical foundation or moral code or not, manifest in tangibly different outcomes. Through this, we introduce and discuss challenges – many not considered previously – associated with programming and regulating high level autonomous vehicles. Based on that, we consider implications for policy as well as the long-term proliferation of the technology.